Susan Grayzel

From her A.B. in History & Literature at Harvard through her PhD in History at UC Berkeley to her ongoing teaching and scholarship, Susan R. Grayzel has been interested in interdisciplinary and collaborative research analyzing the catastrophic wars of the 20th century at the human level. Over the past quarter century, her publications have solidified her standing as a leading scholar of gender and modern war. In addition to her two textbooks (The First World War: A Brief History with Documents and Women and the First World War), her monographs include Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (UNC Press, 1999, awarded the 2000 British Council Prize from the NACBS); At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and most recently, The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which traces state and individual responses to one of the first weapons of mass destruction. Since coming to USU, she has taught and developed a range of new classes, including one based on a 2021-23 NEH Dialogues on the Experience of War Grant with co-PI anthropologist Molly Cannon that aims to allow students to engage with veterans and military families to preserve the material culture and personal stories of modern war.